Browsing by Subject "Interkulttuurinen kompetenssi"

Goals. The theoretical framework for this research is the model of intercultural competence. Attitudes are one of its four dimensions. In this research, intercultural competence refers to those transferable skills that the teacher needs in functioning cooperation with immigrant backgrounded parents. This research aims to find out what attitudes and transferable skills class teachers have to encounter immigrant backgrounded parents. Methods. The research was done by using the qualitative study in questionnaire research. The questionnaire contained open questions that were answered by six class teachers. The answers were gathered by electronic questionnaire form from one primary school from Southern Finland and from few class teachers who were chosen by sporadic sampling. The material was analysed using material-led content analysis by categorizing it to two themes: class teacher’s attitudes to encounter immigrant backgrounded parents and class teacher’s transferable skills to encounter immigrant backgrounded parents. Results and conclusions. The research found out that some teachers felt that the lack of Finnish skills among immigrant backgrounded parents was a challenge for functioning cooperation. However, by most part, the class teacher’s attitudes were shown to be mostly positive towards encountering parents with immigrant background. Many teacher felt the cooperation with immigrant backgrounded parents the same as with other parents. The importance of teachers’ open attitudes was highlighted especially then when there were differences in parties’ cultural views. Teachers diversely aimed to create conditions for the functioning and reciprocal cooperation with immigrant backgrounded parents.

In recent years we have witnessed an increase of globalization and immigration all over the world, hence the rise of a new popular concept – multiculturalism. Living in a multicultural society requires citizens to have skills and knowledge such as the ability to act naturally in intercultural encounters. For some time now intercultural competence has been a vital concept in the field of communication, diplomacy and business and lately it has become stable also in the field of education. The concept simply refers to an ability to think and act in an appropriate and effective way in intercultural encounters. The field of multiculturalism is however polysemous which highly calls for consensus. In this study one´s are exploring teacher´s intercultural skills and competence in the field of education. The aim of this study is to introduce how teacher´s intercultural competence has been defined in the previous studies and what kind of dimensions the concept incorporates. The main object in this study is to describe the concept of teacher´s intercultural competence in the field of education in the light of previous studies. The type of my research was a literature review. The data of this research was eight international articles which definitions of teacher’s intercultural competence I compared and classified. Hence the research has also phenomenographical features in a sense that I brought together different researchers’ perceptions of teacher’s intercultural competence and I examined what similarities and differences these definitions had. Analyctical method in this research was pretty much as generally used in phenomenographical studies where the analysis of review data lead to the creation of various categories. The results indicate that the concept of teacher’s intercultural competence does not have settled definition in the research field. Different researchers define the term in different ways; some of the researchers define the term more broadly and leave unmentioned something that some other definitions bring up. In my research I have divided teacher´s intercultural competence into various categories which allows to approach the concept of intercultural competence through various dimensions. Based on the analysis, the central elements of the teacher’s intercultural competence were clarified which helps understanding the term and relating its different definitions in the field of education.